March 09, 2013

Remembering Ric Menello: A conversation with Mel Neuhaus

I never had the privilege of
meeting the cinephile and cineaste Ric Menello, who died on March 1 at age 60. (His MTV.com obituary is here; a more heartfelt reminiscence from his Brooklyn neighborhood, with links to some pertinent videos, is here.) But during the mid-to-late 1980s, I felt like I almost knew
him, thanks to a couple of mutual friends, people who had studied and hung out
with Ric in the film studies program at NYU. I heard stories of movie-mad
students festooning their sneakers with the names of their favorite directors,
of Ric’s auteur catechism (“What is Budd Boetticher?” “Budd Boetticher is an
auteur.” “Why is Budd Boetticher an auteur?” “Because his films have Mise-en-scène.”) and of some unhygienic payback shenanigans involving the
hairbrush of a certain stuck-up desk monitor at Weinstein Hall who subsequently
went on to her own music-video-related fame. As for Ric, his relationship with
one-time Weinstein Hall resident Rick Rubin led to his directing a few music
videos for the likes of the Beastie Boys and L.L. Cool J. And then…not much,
that people outside of the business would have heard of, until a reemergence
that was bearing more and more good fruit at the time of Menello’s passing.

Mel
Neuhaus was one of Ric’s oldest friends and certainly his closest. I became
acquainted with Mel when he was one of the co-owners of a mail-order laser-disc
outfit called Laser Island. Mel really knew his stuff and had the chops to get
super-obscure items, and I was a pretty good customer if I may say so myself.
(Well I recall pre-ordering the eight-disc Godzilla “Toho Death Battle Chronicles” box set
with a couple of music video compilations on the side [New Order among them];
the day the ordered arrived at Mel’s place, I got shitcanned from my job at
Stereo Review. He very kindly offered to let me back out, but I stuck to the
plan and shelled out the five hundred bucks. Boy, was my live-in girlfriend
unhappy when she came upon that receipt.) In any event, after chatting over
what new goodies I was likely to buy, Mel would clue me in on stuff he was up
to, for instance, collaborating with Ric on a script for a haunted-house comedy
starring the Beastie Boys.

A
little after the laser disc market, such as it was, dried up, Mel and I lost
touch. I thought of him when I learned of Menello’s death, and dropped him a
note. As it happened, he and Menello had become neighbors again over the years.
It was good to make contact with Mel, although I wish I’d been spurred to
do so by a happier occasion. I was glad to learn that Mel, whose dry and
mordant wit was always an outstanding feature of our talks in the past, has
written a novel, Gray Matter, that’s on sale as an e-book at Amazon, which I
bought pretty much immediately and look forward to reading. After we both
bitched and moaned a bit about how poorly the world is treating aging male
cinephiles such as ourselves, we got on the subject of the late, great Menello,
and I’ve reproduced much of the conversation, with some edits and shifts and
compressions I deemed necessary/desirable, below.

Glenn Kenny: I remember being at Cannes in 2008 and
seeing James Gray’s Two Lovers and
seeing Ric's name come up as the co-screenwriter. And thinking how great that was, because I had not heard
much of or about him since the excellent commentary he did for the DVD of Chabrol’s
Cry of the Owl in 2002. And I was
so glad to learn he’d been working more with James Gray. Because I remembered a
lot of the things about him that I’d heard from you, about not just what a
great cinephile he was but how funny and generous he was. How did you and Ric meet? Were you guys boyhood friends or
college friends?

Mel
Neuhaos: We met first year at
NYU. And I remember we were at
some screening, back when the school would show you movies at the Bleecker
Street Cinema. That was
essentially like one of their classroom presentations. And I was just sitting there, I don't
even remember what the movie was.
He was in front of me sitting with some striking brunette—that's what I
remember. And something came up on
the movie, and I made some snarky comment, and he turned around and at first I
thought he was going to tell me to be quiet, but he just kind of appended
it. And I started laughing. And I said, “Oh, that was kind of fun.”
And a little bit later I ran into him and we just started talking and found out
we were sort of on the same page.
We started going to grindhouses seeing spaghetti westerns and Italian Dirty
Harry ripoffs, which were all over the
place back then. And just talking
about movies that we loved.
Frequently he said “Nobody I know has ever heard of this movie except you. “
And I said, well, yeah, man. He
would come over to the apartment up in Washington Heights and we'd watch 16 mm
prints, which was the only way you could collect movies in those days.

GK: I remember coming to one of your
16mm screenings in Brooklyn.

MN: Yeah, I moved to Sheepshead Bay. And
screened every week. And even if
he wasn’t around for that, one day a week it was just Menello day, and he would
come over. Then, after that, laser
discs and then DVDs, and then Blu-Rays. It was a constant. The one time that we
were out of touch for a bit, because he was out on the Coast and everything, we
both discovered obscure Japanese cinema at the same time. And it was bizarre,
‘cause we hadn't talked in a few months.
And you know, we were the kind of guys who got kind of pissed off about
sharing movies with people who had never seen them before; we'd get mad that
they were seeing this for the first time. And we had this kind of “We've seen them all” attitude. But we were so stupid, because there's
so much stuff out there. And I
said to Menello, ”I saw some movies recently that have opened up a whole new
world for me.” And Menello said, “Me too.” And I said, “I’m now into Japanese cinema, but not just
Kurosawa and Ozu. It's beyond
that.” He goes, “Me too.” And I
said, “Like what?” And he's going,
“Well directors like…”--and he started to go, “Shhhh”--and I said
“Shinoda!” And he goes,
“Yes.” And I said, “Goh…” and he'd
finish, “Gosha.” I said, “Yes.” It was just crazy. He said, this is amazing. And we just were talking about that for
hours and hours.

And eventually he came back to New
York we both ended up in Ditmas Park, and Ric was only two blocks away from
us. So we saw him all the time,
and he became kind of a neighborhood fixture. The thing about this area is it's crammed full of
artists. I mean not just writers
but would-be filmmakers, musicians, painters, photographers. And we would all congregate at this
place called Vox Pop. And Ric sort
of became the king of this place.
And you'd walk down the street, everyone would come running out of
stores to say, “Hey, Ric!” My wife called him the Burgomaster of Brooklyn. And
when all this stuff started to come into play for him the whole neighborhood
was just so happy for him. The
year that Two Lovers was eligible,
everyone came to Vox Pop that morning, with Ric, to watch the live feed and see
if Ric would get a nomination.
This is seven in the morning. And Menello is there shaking his head, no,
I'm not going to get nominated, I'm not going to get nominated. And he didn't. But everybody in the neighborhood was
there to commiserate with him. Not
that he really seemed to mind that much, but that was just a typical display of
how the neighborhood felt about him.
And at Vox Pop we had a Menello night when we showed a lot of his
shorts, some of the things he and I made together. There was a promo Menello
and I made in the early 80's to try to raise money to do a low budget
movie. And we played it as Siskel
and Ebert. We showed that and that
got a lot of laughs. And then we
showed this movie I helped out on with Ric and Adam Dubin called Sidesplitters which has sort of become a cult item. Lewis Black and Jim Norton are in it,
playing sort of the Antichrist Abbott and Costello. And then we did a Q and
A. So it was a really nice
night. And I don't know, I mean
I've got 41 years of stories and anecdotes and just hilarious stuff.

GK: I recall you guys were working on a script for a picture
that never got made where the Beastie Boys were in a haunted house scenario. It
was called Scared Stupid, riffing on
Martin and Lewis…

MN: More Abbott and Costello, again, actually, as it turns out.

The funny thing about that is Ric
was working for Def Jam at the time and Rick Rubin said, “I want to do a movie
with The Beasties in the flavor of the Abbott and Costello movies.” And Menello and I particularly loved The
Abbott and Costello Show on television,
because it was—we think it's sort of surreal. Because here they were, kind of this broken-down aging
comedy team…they were Abbott and Costello and they were living in this dumpy rooming house in Paterson, New
Jersey run by a psycho-landlord, Mr. Fields. And except for Mike the cop, all the other tenants were either
thugs or hookers. And Menello and
I thought that was just the greatest concept ever. And what Menello and I would often do when we would talk
about movies or shows we liked, or were working on a thing, we would always
figure out what happened to these characters afterwards, or create entirely
different movie scenarios involving them.
And we said, you know, if Bud and Lou had only lasted as long as Gunsmoke, and that show had gone into the early 70's, we had
this whole scenario planned. Lou
basically stayed the same but Bud embraced the drug culture. And he kind of—you know the way older
guys used to wear the paisley shirts and those long sideburns and the
comb-overs to try to get chicks? Bud became that. And he started becoming a pothead ‘cause he was still living
with Lou and he was just dragging on weed all the time, 24/7. And he changed his name from Bud Abbott
to Bad Abbott.

GK: Nice.

MN: [imitates Lou Costello] “Bud, stop
smoking that stuff.” We would just
go on with that for hours. And so
Menello came over one day and he said, “Let's come up with an idea for the
Beastie Boys movie.” I said, “Well, if you're talking Abbott and Costello,
we've got a little selection here and it's pretty much compartmentalized. You either got the service comedy, the
western comedy, the whodunit or the haunted house thing.” And Menello said, “Well, it's got to be
the haunted house.” I said, “You're right.” So he said, “I'm going to tell Rubin that's what we're going
to do.”

And then we were talking on the
phone about it during the week and I said, “I have this bizarre idea.” “What is it?” “What if you come over on Friday and instead of watching
movies like we always do on the weekends or something, we just spent the entire
weekend doing this script? By that I mean, what if we do the entire script in
one weekend?” “You think we can do that?” “I don't know. Let's try it.” So he came over on Friday afternoon and
we had already the basic outline for the plot. And we broke it down scene by scene. And then we went out to the El Greco
Diner where we would always go and pigged out, and then came back and went over
everything we had done. And I
said, “We've got the entire movie broken down.” Says Ric, “All we got to do now
is write it.” And then: “I'll be
here tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning,” which I thought was amazing for Menello
to say. But he showed up with
reams of loose-leaf paper and pens.
And the way we would do it is we always put different actors or
actresses in parts, whether or not they were living or dead. This is the way we imagined who would
be who. And Menello would be
laying down on the couch with a pad and pen and I would be pacing the floor. And we'd become the characters. And it got to the point where we
started yelling at each other in different voices. It was kind of very Norman Bates-y. But it wouldn't be Mel and Ric yelling
at each other, it would be Oliver Reed and George Sanders having an argument.
At one point we had the slimy lawyer that the Beastie Boys hired and for some
reason we decided it was Jose Ferrer.
And we just started in, and it was real vulgar, which was great. That was the thing. Saying “Listen, you motherfuckers” in a
Jose Ferrer voice, that kind of stuff.
We would just be breaking up laughing. And with the reading of the will… At one point Menello had
gotten got a call from Rubin who told him one of the Beasties was dating Molly
Ringwald, and that she wanted to be in it. So I said, all right, sure. So she kind of became the Joan Davis character. And we spent the entire day doing
this. And then we said, all right,
let's take a break. And we had
gotten through about 80 to 90 percent of the script. And we were shocked.
I said, “This is working.”
He goes, “Let's get something to eat.” So we went out and we got something to eat. And we came back and kind of went
through everything to see if it even made sense. And he says, “It kind of works.” And we finished up the next
day. If you saw it, we had reams
and reams of loose-leaf paper.
Most of it had Menello's doodles of cartoon characters, and there'd be
sometimes only line on a page. If
you stacked up the script pages they would probably go from the floor to your
kneecap. I said, “Oh, God, pity
whoever has to type this up.” And
Menello goes, “It's not going to be me.”
I said, well, “It's not going to be me either.” He goes, “Rubin's going
to take care of it. The thing is,
we got it.”

And I was so shocked when a couple of weeks later he came over
with a typed up script. I remember
he mentioned the woman who was Rubin's assistant who had taken care of it and I
said, “Jeez, she deserves a medal.”
And it was actually reading funny.
And I remember at the time, and it's funny that you mentioned Martin and
Lewis. Because Paramount had wind of the project, and called up threatening
Rubin because they said it sounded too much like Scared Stiff. And
Rubin said, “What are you talking about?”
And they said, “We don't want people to get the two movies
confused.” And so Rubin started
going, “What, you're re-uniting Martin and Lewis?” He goes, “You're talking
about a movie that was made 35 years ago?
What do you mean, people are going to get confused?” And I swear to God, the guy from the
legal department at Paramount said, “We've got high hopes for that movie yet.”

The horrible thing about that was
the Beastie Boys split from Def Jam and fell out with Rubin. And they wanted to take the script with
them and Rubin said, “It's mine.” Like Daffy Duck in the Warner Brothers cartoon--it's
mine, it's mine! And Menello said,
“I guess it's never going to get made cause there's no way—believe me, I can't
get into it, but there's no way they're ever going to get back together again.” And I said, damn. But one of the Beastie Boys at that
time was getting laser disks from me.
And he had talked to Ric and the idea was, “Well maybe Mel would
consider working with us on some project.” There was a lot of bad blood at the
time and Rubin didn’t like that idea, and nothing ever became of it anyway. I
heard that that script was named one of the most wanted never-to-be-made cult
movies ever. And somebody, I
guess, had gotten a copy of one of the drafts or whatever, how it ended up, and
was selling them on eBay for I don't know how much.

GK: Eventually the Beastie Boys had their
rapprochement with Rick Rubin.
They were in a completely different place as performers by that point.

MN: Yeah. I must
have a copy of the script somewhere. I
remember some funny stuff in there.

GK: I mentioned before, Ric’s
commentary on the DVD of Cry of the Owl
is really something.

MN:
Well for as long as I knew him Ric would say of Chabrol, “He's my favorite
living director.” And Ric wrote him a fan letter, and Chabrol wrote him back
and Menello would sit there translating, with a French-English dictionary what
he said. And he would correspond with Chabrol and Chabrol—I don't remember what
movie it was, it might have been Story of Women or Madame Bovary, one of
those pictures from around that period—Chabrol sent Ric his script with all his
annotations in it. And Menello was
over the moon about it. He says,
“I can't believe this.” And they
kind of…things happened, they lost touch.

When James Gray was at Cannes with Two
Lovers he was sitting next to Chabrol at an
event. And Chabrol loved James Gray.
He goes, “You're the only American director I like.” And James thanks him. And Chabrol goes, “I was shocked when I
saw the name Ric Menello and I was wondering, could it be the same Ric Menello
who used to write to me in the 80's?”
And James says, “Yes, Ric told me about that.” And Chabrol says, “Why did he stop writing?” James
replied, “I don't know, I guess he didn't want to bother you. That's the way Ric is. “ And Chabrol
says, “No, no, no.” He gave him
his contact information. “You must
tell him to get in touch with me.”
So Ric was thrilled. And I said, “Why didn't you go to
Cannes?” And he goes, “Well, a
couple of reasons.” I said, “Well
what's one?” “I don't have a
passport.” “That's a good reason.”

I had been shooting footage for a
documentary Adam Dubin was producing about Ric, and after I heard this story, I
said to Dubin, “If we go take this movie to the extreme, this is the only thing
I want to go and manufacture.
Everything else just happens.
But I want this to be planned. I want to contact Chabrol and tell him about it,
because I'm sure he'll agree, and I want to fly Menello over to France to
just--under the pretense of getting some kind of award or something like that. We'll actually film him going to the
passport office to get his passport. Which will be hilarious in and of
itself. And he meets Chabrol. And I want an overhead shot of the two
of them walking off together, like the end of Casablanca. And
that's the only thing I want to plan.”
And Dubin said, “That's great.”
Of course in the interim Chabrol passed away. And then the project went on the back burner for a while.
But I'm glad that Adam wants to do something with it now.

The only consolation with respect
to his passing is that the last three months were the happiest I've ever seen
Menello. ‘Cause everything was
starting to really open up for him.
He has a new movie he wrote with James Gray, Lowlife, coming out in a couple of weeks. And Thanksgiving we always get together
at a mutual friend's house and she does this huge layout. And he had just seen the movie and he
said, “First of all it was no digital crap, it was an actual 35 mm print,” so
he was all excited about that. And
he said, “Do you remember when I first saw Two Lovers and I said I thought it came out way better than I
thought, I really was proud of it?”
I said, “Yeah.” And he
said, “This grinds it into the dust.
If I ever get remembered for one thing, I'd be happy if it was
this. It was great. It looks like an epic, it moves, everything
works. I'm so happy about it.” I said, “Well, that's great, Ric.” And then we were exchanging notes cause
we were going to start another script at the end of this month. He had also been contracted to do a
screenplay for a biopic on Jimmy Roselli, which he was working on. And the final draft went through with
the producers and they greenlit it.
And he was so excited about that too. He was supposed to pick up his check on Monday. And on top
of that, we went to some industry Christmas party where we met a man who,
unbeknownst to us, turned out to be some enormously successful producer. He kind of passed himself off as “Well,
I've made a couple documentaries.”
He did a lot more than that. And we met with him a few weeks ago and he
was interested in having us develop a crime series for TV with him. And we're
coming back afterwards and he turned to me and he said, you know, “You're the
most pessimistic bastard I know after me.” And he put his hand on my arm and he
said, “For the first time in my life, I'm cautiously optimistic.” And it's just--it's such a fucking
shame.

I took him to some media events I
was covering freelance, and they said you could bring a guest. We had a blast. And one of them was for the 40th
anniversary of Cabaret and it was kind
of one of those things—you know, ”You want to go?” And he said, “Yeah, what the hell, why not?” Then he said,
“You think Marisa Berenson will be there?” I said, “It's possible. They said all the principals will be there.” And Menello goes, “But not Bob
Fosse.” I said, “Well, if he is,
I'm going to run like hell.” So we went.
It was at the Trump Tower.
You walk in and you look at the bottled water and they had Trump
Water. It had his picture on it.
We started laughing about that. I don't know if you've ever been to one of
those things, but it's in a suite, they set you, 2 or 3 journalists, at each
table and it's like speed dating.

GK: Yeah, I did that with Leon Vitali and
Malcolm MacDowell for the Kubrick Blu-ray releases…

MN: Yeah, yeah, so you know how that works.
So it's Michael York and Joel Grey and we were talking to them, and they were
really nice and it was great, ‘cause you could get really intimate with these
people and it was fun. And then
after everything was said and done, we were really asking questions we wanted
to ask them. Menello and I brought
up Accident to Michael York, and he just
lit up: “God bless you both.” He
just started talking to us about Losey and Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker and
it was just great. And then we
were asking him about, we said,
“We're very fond of a movie you did called Zeppelin.” And
he says,” I actually like that too.
I'm particularly fond of one critic's review who said, ‘It's a
gas.’”

And I was talking to Joel Grey
about this movie, Man on a Swing that I
kind of thought was quirky. He
kind of was surprised that anybody knew about it. Then he talked to Menello at another table and Menello
brings it up and Grey goes, “Somebody else just asked me that.” And Menello goes, “That's my best
friend. I'm his guest here
today.” So we're sitting there,
and then t I look over and I jab Menello in the side and I said, “I think
Marisa Berenson's coming in.” Menello goes, “What?” She came in, and she looked gorgeous. And she's sitting down. And Menello’s like, “Please let her be
smart.” We're talking to her. And
she was great. And she was very intuitive about the differences of working with
Kubrick as opposed to Visconti.
All this great stuff that she was talking about. We were just thrilled. And Menello was started asking her some
questions and he stopped and he says, “I just have to say this. You're so beautiful. I can't stop
thinking how gorgeous you are. I
just wanted to say it.” And she
said “Oh, well thank you.” And she
said, “And who are you with again?”
And Menello goes, “Well actually I'm not even supposed to be here.” And
he pointed to me and says “This is my best friend Mel and he's writing for this
Examiner online or whatever, and I'm his guest. But we've written a lot of stuff together and I've
actually…well, I wrote a movie a couple of years ago with James Gray. “ And she
says, “Oh yes? What movie was
that?” “It was this movie called Two
Lovers.” And Marisa Berenson gasps, and she says, “I love that
movie!” And Menello was in
heaven. And he just was like,
“Really?” Yeah. And afterwards he came over, he was
like in a trance. And I said,
“Ric, this is crazy. Go up to her
and let me get a picture of you guys.” And so he goes up to her: “Would it be
all right if Mel took a picture?”
She goes, are you kidding?
And she grabbed Menello and he was just flying. And then afterwards, he said, “I don't
want you to think me being out of line or anything like this, but when the new
movie comes out in the spring, James has indicated to me that he might arrange
for me to do a modestly budget movie that I could write and direct.” Ric goes
on, “I have no idea what it would
be yet, but it's up there and I just wanted to know, would it be all right to
get in touch with you….because I mean again, I don't know what it's going to be
but I would love to have you involved in it if you wanted to.” And she just said, “Of course, of
course.” She gave him her e-mail address and he was just…you know…he just said,
“I didn't think anything could top the event we went to last night”—which was
like the 90th anniversary of Warner Brothers thing, which was fun—“but this
topped it.” And he goes, “This is
like, everything's going.
Everything's going for me.
Everything. “ And I said, “Yeah.
Good stuff. “

What an amazing story. I met Ric at NYU and I can see all of this in my head and hear his voice. Ric looks so cool in the header photo. Great tribute. It's too bad he couldn't enjoy more of his long-earned recognition.